Mars Blackmon (Spike Lee) visits Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns) in her apartment in She’s Gotta Have It, the movie that launched Lee as an important American filmmaker. (All plates are screen shots made for the author.)
1
THE EARLY JOINTS
Shelton Jackson Lee, nicknamed Spike by his mother as an infant, entered the world in Atlanta on March 20, 1957. His mother was Jacquelyn Shelton Lee, a schoolteacher, and his father was Bill Lee, a musician. Deciding he could have a more successful career if he lived in Chicago, the “jazz Mecca” of the period, Bill Lee moved the family there, and then joined the throng of jazz musicians who relocated to New York in the late fifties. Putting down stakes in Brooklyn, the family settled first in Crown Heights, then in Cobble Hill – where they were the first African-Americans to live – and then in Fort Greene, a neighborhood seen by many outsiders at that time as less than desirable, if not actually dangerous or disreputable. Spike’s mother was an important influence on his childhood, exposing him and his siblings to mainstream and African-American culture by way of books, plays, museums, and art exhibitions.
Music was an important part of the picture as well, and Spike sometimes heard his father play the bass at the Blue Note and other New York clubs. His three younger siblings – sister Joie, born in 1962, and brothers David and Cinqué, born in 1961 and 1966 – went to Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, a predominantly white private institution where their mother had become the first African-American teacher. Ever independent, though, Spike had already chosen to attend the John Dewey High School, a public school in the Coney Island neighborhood of Brooklyn with a largely black student body. Ever consistent, moreover, after graduating in 1975 he enrolled at the historically black, all-male Morehouse College in Atlanta, where his grandfather and father (a classmate of Martin Luther King Jr. there) had gone. His tuition was paid by his grandmother, Zimmie Shelton, an alumna of the all-female Spelman College across the street from Morehouse, which Spike’s mother had also attended.
Seeing a lot of movies for diversion after his mother’s sudden death in 1977, Spike became seriously interested in the possibilities of film for the first time. “I had gotten a Super 8 camera,” he recalled later, “so I spent the whole summer just going around New York City and filming stuff. That was really when I decided that I wanted to be a filmmaker” (Lindo 165). Back at Morehouse with two years still to go for his degree in mass communication, he continued his experiments and made Last Hustle in Brooklyn, his debut short, before graduating in 1977. Returning to New York, he put an official stamp on his commitment to film, becoming one of very few black students in the graduate film program of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, where he spent three years earning an MFA in production. He was not overly fond of NYU, to put it delicately: professors there questioned his grasp of “film grammar,” and he sensed an unspoken racial bias in their criticisms. “Any time a black person is in a white environment,” he remarked later, “and they are not always happy – smiling, eating cheese [ – ] then [others] say he’s a militant or has an attitude.” His first-year film, The Answer (1980), did not change that impression. Discussing it with Nelson George, an African-American critic, Lee described it as the story of “a black screenwriter hired to direct a fiftymillion-dollar remake of Birth of a Nation. We included clips from Birth of a Nation. They didn’t like that thing at all. How dare I denigrate the father of cinema, D.W. Griffith?” George responded by observing that The Answer indicts Griffith’s epic Civil War movie as a “racist” work, which of course it is, and Lee replied, “Yeah. No shit, Sherlock.” George further observed that the film must have “offended” people to elicit such negative responses, and Lee answered, “Yeah. I didn’t care” (Lee 1987, 33–4).
In sum, Lee was ready from the start to work against the grain of mainstream white cinema. Aware that Los Angeles is allegedly the motion-picture capital of the world, he dutifully gave it a shot, traveling west and taking an internship at Columbia Pictures, which he soon left for several reasons: he didn’t know how to drive, he “didn’t have the resources [there] to make films,” and he simply “wanted to come home” (Lee 1987, 33–4). The idea of laboring on money-driven projects dreamed up by other people must also have grated on his sensibility.
SPIKE CUTS HEADS
His dissatisfaction with NYU notwithstanding, Lee made three movies while studying there, including his 1983 thesis film, Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads, a seminal work that sets forth three important clues to his future career. For one, the movie cuts heads – not in the barbering sense but in the sense of revealing and excising the inherited ideas, reactionary fantasies, and unexamined prejudices that Americans too often carry around in their minds. For another, it taps into areas of interest that Spike has been investigating and building on ever since: humor, gangster films, and “the incorporation of negritude” into a familiar movie genre (Lee 1987, 34). For the third, Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop is very much a New York movie, signaling that Lee’s ongoing analysis of America’s complicated, mercurial character would always be informed by his experiences in that city, the country’s most protean and multifarious urban zone.
Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop centers on Zachariah Homer (Monty Ross), who takes over a barbering business after proprietor Joe (Horace Long) dies in a mob-related hit. Zach fares poorly at “head cutting” and his economic future looks grim until he meets the criminal who had set Joe up in the numbers game, a long-established racket whereby people bet on their predictions of the last three digits of the day’s total racetrack-gambling figure. Learning that his barbershop will now be a base of operations, Zach has to choose between stooping to their level or standing by his principles.
Spike’s decision to make this “semi-gangster” picture was guided partly by the real-world nature of the subject. Numbers-running is a billion-dollar business, he explains in his autobiographical book Spike Lee: That’s My Story and I’m Sticking to It, and it has “always been a key part of the African-American community” (18). Lee also takes the opportunity to revise the blaxploitation and black-mobster genres, taking them in a more humanistic direction, and to profile some of the character types he encountered in Brooklyn on a regular basis. The movie’s attentive portraits of Zach and his social-worker wife, Ruth (Donna Bailey), provided “some of the first sympathetic and detailed glimpses of the borough’s African American faces, personalities, and communities,” in the words of film scholar Paula J. Massood (125), who also notes Lee’s effective use of rap music and break dancing to pinpoint the story’s time and place.
Although the story is set squarely in Brooklyn – at the intersection of Flatbush Avenue and Myrtle Avenue, to be precise – Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop proved anything but parochial in its appeal. It won a student Merit Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, shared a prize at a Swiss film festival, and made Spike the first student filmmaker to earn a slot in the highly selective New Directors/ New Films event, presented each year by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, two of New York’s most important cultural institutions. Spike acquired an agent at the powerful William Morris Agency on the strength of the film. And he had demonstrated his talent for collaboration, a key ingredient in the filmmaking process: Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop was photographed by Ernest Dickerson, who went on to shoot every Lee picture from She’s Gotta Have It in 1986 to Malcolm X in 1992; the cast included She’s Gotta Have It costar Tommy Redmond Hicks; and the sound was recorded by assistant director Ang Lee, later to become a major American filmmaker in his own right. Spike’s accomplishments with Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop gave his morale a major boost at a time when prospects for African-American cinema – and for his own career in the industry – seemed, as usual, highly uncertain.
BROOKLYN
Woody Allen is provincial about Manhattan, as reflected in his work; and I am provincial about Brooklyn in mine. Maybe one’s [sports] fandom was part of it. Sensibilities must start somewhere. – Spike Lee (Eliot 107)
A winning element in Lee’s filmography is his loyalty to Brooklyn, the city within a city where he grew up, began his career, and maintains his professional nerve center, 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks, to this day. We should therefore visit Brooklyn before traveling farther into Spike’s America as a whole.
Welcome Back, Kotter (ABC, 1975–9), a popular classroom sitcom starring Gabe Kaplan and John Travolta, started each episode with a montage that included a highway sign reading “Welcome to Brooklyn: 4th Largest City in America.” The boast is still justified. According to the United States Census, more than two and a half million people lived in Brooklyn in 2010, and although projections suggest that Houston, Texas, may acquire the fourth-largest-city title by 2030, for now it is safely in Brooklyn’s hands. All of this comes with the obvious caveat that Brooklyn is not an independent city at all: it is the most populous of the five boroughs that constitute New York City, and the second largest (after Queens, its near neighbor) in geographical size. It is isomorphic with Kings County, one of five counties within New York City, and its population is strikingly diverse. Around 35 percent of its residents are non-Hispanic whites and a slightly smaller percentage – about 877,000 persons – are African-Americans, followed by Hispanics and Latinos at 20 percent, Asians at 10 percent, and others at 2 percent. About 25 percent of Brooklyn’s residents have yearly incomes that place them below the official poverty line.
Fort Greene, the uptown neighborhood where Lee’s family settled, is in northwestern Brooklyn, not far from the Brooklyn Bridge, which connects the borough with Manhattan to the west. Free blacks lived there long before the Civil War – the slaves in New York State were emancipated in 1841 – and during the Civil War period its largely working-class population was joined by upper-class people moving north from downtown, drawn partly by Fort Greene’s reputation for high-grade educational institutions. For about thirty years beginning in the early 1960s, Fort Greene suffered badly from the epidemic of crime, drugs, and poverty that weighed heavily on New York and many other American cities. But reclamation, gentrification, and urban preservation helped the neighborhood regain its footing in the second half of the 1980s, and 40 Acres & A Mule, founded in 1986, was a pioneer in this effort, sparking comparisons between Fort Greene’s rising artistic star and the legendary Harlem renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s.
A few years later a sociologist described Fort Greene as “a tolerant, relaxed neighborhood, not a homogeneous one that resists strangers” (Jackson 1). Today it is known for its architecture in the Eastlake and Italianate styles, dating from the middle of the nineteenth century; for such major cultural facilities as the Brooklyn Academy of Music and its annex, the BAM Harvey Theater; and for schools including the Brooklyn Technical High School and the nearby Pratt Institute, which trains creative professionals and artists. Spike moved himself and his family to Manhattan in 1998, buying an Upper East Side townhouse when he and his wife, Tonya, became parents and felt the need for a more secure and secluded residence than they were able to find in their Brooklyn neighborhood. “Here we are much more anonymous,” Tonya Lee said in 2004 (Allon). Spike’s heart and production company are still in Fort Greene, however, and will probably remain there for good.
SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT
The Color Purple . . . is weak . . . but that was no surprise. WE, I, GOTTa MAKE OUR OWN GODDAMN FILMS. FUCK HAVING THESE WHITE BOYS FUCK UP TELLING OUR STORIES. WE GOTTA TELL OUR OWN AS ONLY WE CAN. – Spike Lee (1987, 253)
Brooklyn has not always been as friendly to Lee as he has been to the borough. He has spoken candidly about the difficulties he ran into while shooting She’s Gotta Have It there in 1986, and he has been equally frank about his unhappiness with some aspects of the film itself. As he later recalled,
We were cashin’ in bottles for change, because we had so little money. I remember, we were shootin’ in [a] loft in the middle of the summer – it musta been a hundred and four degrees up there. . . . We only shot for twelve days, but every night . . . I had to think about tryin’ to go out and raise money for the very next day.
As for the end result, “the acting was bad. . . . I didn’t really know how to direct” (E. Mitchell 46–7).
Artists are not always the best judges of their own work, and while box-office profits are a poor indicator of artistic quality, the success of She’s Gotta Have It marked Lee’s emergence as a notable independent filmmaker and consolidated 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks, Inc., as a viable enterprise. (According to Box Office Mojo, the film parlayed its $175,000 budget into returns of well over $7,000,000.)1 It also linked Lee with what Massood calls a “Brooklyn chronotope,” using theorist Mikhail Bakhtin’s term for a unified construction of narrative time and space. Before we see characters we see the Brooklyn Bridge, then the Brooklyn building where the heroine lives. Manhattan, the star of so many Hollywood movies, plays a bit part – it is an Elsewhere that only one of the film’s dramatis personae finds appealing. The movie strikingly integrates its story with the sights, sounds, folkways, and mores that would surround a young Brooklynite in the mid-eighties. Depicting a “black urbanscape . . . different from any other African-American space screened thus far,” as Massood writes (126), the film replaces such iconic locations as Manhattan’s fabled Apollo Theater and 125th Street bustle with Brooklyn shots of “identifiable subway stops, the Fulton Mall, the Promenade along the East River, and Fort Greene Park” (129), all filmed on location.
The result is a Brooklyn movie par excellence, making up in authenticity what it lacks in budget and polish. Looking back on She’s Gotta Have It two years after its premiere, the African-American author and Fort Greene resident Thulani Davis observed that the film “took place in a black neighborhood [and] was about black people and . . . was from a black perspective, but nobody said anything about that within the context of the narrative. It was taken for granted,” and a New York Times article called the picture “a turning point for both the neighborhood and for Fort Greene’s younger generation of creative artists.” Lee himself saw the neighborhood as the launching pad for his career as “a black nationalist with a movie camera – and that’s a dangerous combination” (Shipp 1988, 3, 5).
The woman who’s “gotta have it” in the film is Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns), a freewheeling Brooklynite with an active sex life that signals her refusal of double-standard morality. She begins the story by speaking directly to the audience in one of the self-reflexive shots that Lee calls “confessions,” already becoming a trademark in his work. “That’s it, that’s the word,” he wrote in a 1984 journal entry. “confession. The characters in this film are confessing. Of course, not all of them are telling the truth, only what they perceive as the truth” (1987, 112). Nola says she wants to “clear [her] name,” not of being promiscuous but of imputations that her habit of occasionally breaking lovers’ hearts is somehow less excusable than similar behavior by a man would be. Over the course of the film she experiments with various approaches to sex and sexuality in relationships with three very different lovers, making mistakes along the way but remaining her own woman in the end.
There are three men in Nola’s life, and sometimes in her bed. One is Jamie Overstreet (Tommy Redmond Hicks), who introduces himself in another direct-address shot, saying, “I believe that there is only one person, only one in this world that is meant to be your soul mate, your lifelong companion . . . Nola was the one.” Jamie thinks this makes him a sentimental sweetheart, but commentator Terry McMillan more accurately describes him as the kind of man who “would try to put the clamps on you after you fucked him real good and . . . would orchestrate and plan out your entire life” (24), which is a good précis of how Lee evidently wants him to be perceived. The second man Nola currently dates, Greer Childs (John Canada Terrell), is a sleek-looking model with a surplus of self-regard. In the screenplay Lee calls him a pretty boy who “takes his good looks for granted, it’s a given,” adding that if a woman doesn’t take notice of this “he automatically thinks there is something wrong with her” (1987, 301). Greer’s confession confirms his egotism: “I’m the best thing that ever happened to Nola . . . It was I who made her a better person.” As self-regarding as this sounds, it’s his later sentences that make him a bonafide Lee villain. “If she would have only listened to me and moved out of Brooklyn,” says the Manhattan dweller, “we would be together this very day. It’s not civilized over there.” Lee himself plays Mars Blackmon, the third boyfriend.
Mars Blackmon (Spike Lee) visits Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns) in her apartment in She’s Gotta Have It, the movie that launched Lee as an important American filmmaker. (All plates are screen shots made for the author.)
At first Mars thought Nola was “freaky-deaky,” he confesses; but after having “def” sex with her, he decided that “all men wants freaks, we just don’t want ’em for a wife.” This crisply illustrates yet another kind of male hubris. Mars is the film’s most comical figure, uttering his signature plea for Nola’s ministrations – “Please, baby, please, baby, please, baby, baby, baby, please!” – like a half-demented rapper whose mind and mouth aren’t quite in touch with each other. It isn’t clear just why Nola is interested in this scruffy guy, but his presence gives the story added humor, spice, and, above all, energy. Mars is the first of several less-thanadmirable secondary characters whom Spike has portrayed; others include the hapless Half-Pint in School Daze, the inept Giant in Mo’ Better Blues, the unreliable Cyrus in Jungle Fever, and the dope-dealing Snuffy in Crooklyn. His most memorable role is Mookie, the pizza-delivery guy in Do the Right Thing who manages the triple threat of being likable, lackadaisical, and fearlessly decisive in the film’s most intense moment. Lee’s range as an actor is narrow, but he plays Mars as he plays these others, with a blend of self-effacing wit and attention-grabbing savvy that bespeaks remarkable talent within the circumscribed sphere of character types he has marked out for himself.
Nola’s experiments in sexuality lead to a couple of final ventures that she quickly finds to be dead ends: first celibacy, then going back to Jamie, whom she thinks of as “her best friend in the world.” Her last confession sums up both the character’s strength of mind and the filmmaker’s wish to celebrate her independent spirit. “I got a little crazy,” she says of her short-lived return to Jamie, “should have never gone back in the first place. It was a momentary weakness. He wanted a wife, that mythic old-fashioned girl next door. But it’s more than that. It’s really about control, my body, my mind. Who was going to own it? Them? Or me? I’m not a one-man woman. Bottom line.” Whereupon she smiles and jumps into what she calls the “loving bed” in her Brooklyn loft, surrounded by softly glowing candles. Cut to black, roll end credits.
Not everyone is persuaded by Nola’s final words. “Autonomy is not depicted as a life-enhancing, empowering choice” in the film, writes the African-American feminist critic bell hooks, claiming that the protagonist’s “decision to be self-defining leaves her as vacuous and as empty as she has previously appeared,” without even the “savvy” she earlier displayed in her occasional “vamp” persona. Although she has had plenty of sex, hooks continues, “what she has not had is a sense of self that would enable her to be fully autonomous and sexually assertive, independent, and liberated” (2008, 8). Michele Wallace, also an African-American cultural critic, shares hooks’s misgivings about the film’s negativity toward lesbian sexuality; the lesbian Opal Gilstrap (Raye Dowell), who unsuccessfully sets her sights on Nola, “comes on like the original serpent in the Garden of Eden,” she writes. Wallace likewise declares that Nola often seems “less like a character than a dark continent to be explored and conquered.” Nola’s language in her direct-address confessions, Wallace adds, “seems inane and self-canceling, as if she were selling something in a TV commercial” (26).
Perhaps most important, hooks and Wallace are both troubled by Lee’s handling of the scene in which Jamie forces himself on Nola when she rejects his marriage proposal. Wallace points out that in the journal Lee kept while making She’s Gotta Have It and published after the film’s release, he clearly indicates that Jamie is the “best man” among Nola’s lovers and never calls what Jamie does a rape; yet she allows that “these matters work out considerably better in the film than in the notebooks,” since Lee ultimately “resists the obvious conclusion, in which the best man marries Nola, the prize” (25). Taking a harder line, hooks observes that Nola refers to the event as a “near rape,” as if it weren’t really such a bad thing, and contrasts two kinds of responses to the scene. One sort comes from viewers (presumably female) who feel “seduced and betrayed” as well as “passively disgusted, disturbed.” The other comes from “sexist male viewers” who, having felt vilified by earlier scenes critiquing male supremacy, vocally cheer Jamie on, “expressing their satisfaction that the uppity black woman [has] been put in her place.” So far apart are interpretations of the incident, hooks acknowledges, that many people she spoke with “did not notice that there was a rape scene.” She herself felt no such ambivalence, however: for her, the film “impresses on the consciousness of black males, and all males, the sexist assumption that rape is an effective means of patriarchal social control,” while simultaneously telling “black females, and all females, that being sexually assertive will lead to rejection and punishment” (2008, 6–7).
Wallace and hooks make valid points, but so do other critics (many of them outside the academic world) who recognize She’s Gotta Have It as a work of popular art and an intervention in popular culture, not a polemic that fails to make an airtight case for right-minded conclusions. Writing for the New York Times, reviewer D.J.R. Bruckner wrote that the characters “are not victims of blind forces; they make choices, defend them and grow in understanding, not always happily, as a result.” The entertainment trade newspaper Variety (1985) found that the film has everything needed for “an interesting yarn” except a “compelling central figure,” but accurately observed that the Nola character “is, clearly, trying to find herself,” albeit in ways not interesting enough for the reviewer. Praising the film’s “psychological authenticity” in the Chicago Reader, critic Peter Keough described Nola as “an earthily charismatic young woman” whose “independence” combines with the “clashing styles” of her three lovers “in comic situations that build into giddy fugues.” These are brief but balanced assessments of Nola’s sincere yet imperfect and ultimately incomplete quest for knowledge of herself, her sexuality, and what her most gratifying role in black American society might be.
The objections to She’s Gotta Have It expressed by hooks and Wallace have less persuasive force when placed against the fact that Lee’s first feature film is also his first major foray into the dialectical mode of pop-cultural analysis that has remained a constant in his work. As ever, he is not particularly caught up in specific views of right and wrong, good and bad, correct and incorrect; his method is more concerned with setting up situations where different perspectives on moral, ethical, romantic, and other such issues can emerge with roughly equal weight, intersect with one another in comic or dramatic ways, and produce questions and conundrums instead of resolutions and conclusions. What are the right things for Nola to do ? Should she like lesbian sex better? Crank up her vampishness more often? Try to sound more confident in her confessions? Say “actual rape” instead of “near rape” when she reflects on that traumatic experience? Spike doesn’t say, because he doesn’t lay claim to neat answers for messy questions. Rape is no less grave a matter than hooks suggests, but Wallace has a more nuanced take on this aspect of the film, realizing that since moral evaluation must always be relative and subjective to a degree, Lee at least merits approval for steering away from the conventionally “obvious solution” and presenting Nola as an aspiring free spirit, if not an actual one, at the end of her story.
In fairness to Lee’s less forgiving critics, it must also be said that where I see sophisticated dialectical thinking in Lee’s films, others see indecisiveness and dithering. “Lee seems incapable of making a straightforward statement about the social and political issues he depicts,” Benjamin Saltman wrote in the early 1990s. “His juxtaposition of anecdotes defines no particular stance, no unified vision. Those who want a definite statement such as ‘Fight the power’ will not find it, because Lee is himself divided about the nature of the struggle. He will not and perhaps cannot embrace an ideology. He inhabits an aimless political space” (40). This point of view deserves to be taken seriously, although for the most part I don’t share it. Lee’s practice of putting “definite” and “straightforward” statements into dialogic play with the messiness and irresolution of actual American life makes him a realistic and pragmatic political thinker, not an aimless one.
As a final note about Nola, I will add that she is a dark continent not only to the men in her bed but also in many ways to herself, as are we all in the daily negotiations between our fractured, impulsive selves and the fractured, overbearing world in which we live. Lee takes this as a given with Nola, as he does with virtually all the characters in his films. She is not the liberated woman that hooks and Wallace would like to see, but she is a bravely self-inventing woman whose sense of self is very much a work in progress, as one would expect in a person so young, able, and attractive. While she doesn’t always choose her next moves shrewdly or interpret her past mistakes wisely, she deserves the compliment Lee and Johns pay her by giving her personality such a delicate balance of complexity, vulnerability, and charm. “Nola Darling is my heroine,” Lee wrote in his production journal. “I love and respect her, and I must show that love and respect in my treatment of her in the script. That’s the way it gotta be” (1987, 70).
Uplifting the Race
For his second feature, the dark musical comedy School Daze, Lee left his beloved New York borough for the South, locating the film at fictional Mission College, a black institution where “Uplift the Race” is the motto, sexual machismo is everywhere, and rampant colorism fuels separation and conflict between African-American students with lighter and darker skins. Although the surroundings are very different from the Brooklyn of She’s Gotta Have It, Lee again strikes autobiographical chords, since while the Morehouse College he attended was not the crazy house of School Daze, it was nonetheless an African-American school in a Southern college town. Lee makes Mission the setting for an obstreperous portrayal of racial politics within a cross-section of the African-American community, sketched out with hyperbole and tendentiousness rather than realism or objectivity in mind. Some find the film biting and truthful; others deem it bitter, self-defeating, and mean. In short, it raised the noisiest ruckus so far in Spike’s career when it premiered in 1988.
The story takes place during homecoming weekend, when tensions between the school’s opposing camps, the light-skinned Haves and the darker Have-Nots, are running higher than usual. Film scholar Michele Wallace doesn’t much like School Daze, with its incursions of misogyny and homophobia, but she crisply summarizes the dramatis personae who set the tale in motion:
Dap [Laurence Fishburne], the story’s protonationalist hero, and Da Fellas, or male Jigaboos, are participating in a rally to protest South African apartheid and the failure of Mission College to divest. . . . Trouble promptly arrives in the form of the stylishly dressed [male] Gamma Phi Gammas, the principal contingent of the Wannabees [sic], led by a proto-Nazi [student, called Dean Big Brother Al-might-ty, played by Giancarlo Esposito] and flanked by the glamorous [female] Gamma Rays. They don’t give a damn about divestment or the plight of South African blacks. As Julian/Big Brother Almighty so succinctly puts it, “I’m from Detroit! Motown!”
The particular cause of conflict is the display the Gammas are making of breaking in eight, baldheaded, sycophantic, slavelike pledges, who are being led along, chain-gang style, on leashes. “It takes a real man to be a Gamma man!” the Gammites chant at the top of their lungs, “Because only a Gamma man is a real man!”
One of the pledges, Wallace adds, occupies a uniquely liminal status in the film, being the only character who appears to communicate effectively with both groups: “none other than the bigeyed auteur Spike Lee, as Half-Pint, Dap’s cousin” (27). Wallace’s tone implies that the “bigeyed auteur” has somehow outgrown his britches or aspired beyond his station; but to the extent that Half-Pint does serve as a living link between the opposing camps in the story, he is an appropriate analogue for Lee, the filmmaker who creates racially complex fictions on the screen in order to communicate with racially complex audiences in movie theaters. The somewhat similar figure Lee went on to play in his next film, Do the Right Thing, does much the same: as the delivery man for Sal’s pizza emporium, he divides his time between traversing the story’s African-American milieu and working inside the pizzeria itself, seeing the business’s Italian-American proprietors more closely and clearly than any of his black neighbors are able to do.
Addressing the film’s African-American detractors, sociologist Michael Eric Dyson blames hostility to School Daze on the “dirty-laundry theory of racial politics,” according to which African-Americans must observe “a tedious etiquette of racial manners” based on the notion that “negative, controversial, or critical news about black folk, especially if its source is other blacks, must be handled in secrecy away from the omniscient gaze of white society” (xxiii). School Daze violates this etiquette, Dyson writes, by revealing “the lethal confrontations black folk have over hair texture, skin complexion, class status, and educational attainment” (xxiv). Noting that production of Lee’s “morality play” was forced to leave the Morehouse College campus “allegedly due to crossed signals regarding the availability of dorm space for filming,” Dyson asserts that “a more likely explanation may be retaliation by Morehouse’s administration against Lee’s critical look at the rituals of black self-hate dramatized in full color and sketched on a film canvas that the entire public was invited to view.” This bespeaks a “racial insecurity” and a “narrowness of racial vision” that must, in Dyson’s eyes, “be addressed and opposed” (xxiii–xiv).
Lee’s assault on race-based narrowness and insecurity centers on differences – both personal and ideological – between Da Fellas and the Gamma gangs. The students from working-class backgrounds celebrate their racial roots and call their politically complacent peers Wannabe whites, while the more privileged students disdain racial activism. “Back to Mother Africa, that’s bullshit,” says Big Brother Almighty of the frat-boy set. “We’re all black Americans. You don’t know a goddamn thing ’bout Africa. I’m from Chi-town!” The film’s intersecting battles are conducted partly on physical levels, partly on psychological levels, and very much on linguistic levels; the students’ cries of “jigaboo” and “wannabe” have provoked a fair share of the animus directed at the film. This aspect of the film suggests a tie between Lee and Frantz Fanon, the philosopher, psychiatrist, and theorist who held that racial alienation and self-hatred are essential products of colonialism, and contended that in racist cultures language is the “primary instrument” through which dominance is exercised upon oppressed people and estrangement is expressed by them (Sharpley-Whiting 9–10).
Code-Switching
Lee’s sophisticated grasp of language codes and linguistic shadings is illustrated particularly well in the scene of School Daze wherein Dap and five friends drive to a Kentucky Fried Chicken joint, smoothing over a severe disagreement they’ve just had by exchanging repartee along the way. The mood turns downward when they arrive at the eatery, encountering black working-class townies who see them as rich kids and outsiders. Dap’s brief stab at racial camaraderie goes nowhere, but his group makes an honorable retreat, puzzling about the experience on their way back to the campus. In a detailed study of language variations in this episode, sociolinguist Margaret Thomas observes that speech appears in the different social contexts of language among intimates, conventional service language, and language among strangers. It carries different affects as well, ranging from playful joking on the way to the chicken place, veiled resentment from the waitress, overt hostility during the clash with the locals, and sober conversation as Dap and company drive back to campus. The dialogue also produces many different speech acts, as language is used for purposes of teasing, informing, requesting, rejecting, challenging, conciliating, insulting, denying, attacking, supporting, threatening, reflecting, agreeing, and disagreeing (Thomas 914).
One of the scene’s most intriguing features is its display of verbal code-switching, whereby characters mix standard English with what linguists identify as black English or African-American Vernacular, modulating their speech in ways that indicate affiliations of class and ethnicity. Throughout the film, people make spontaneous adjustments in their speech to convey implicit claims about their social identities at that moment; in the chicken-joint scene, they shift between standard English and AAV both to define themselves and to put across unstated propositions about the identities of others. Thomas’s analysis of this scene finds many instances of meaningful code-switching, such as those incorporated by the dialogue quoted below. (AAV usages are indicated by nonstandard spellings, italics, and brackets around words the English alphabet can’t approximate; the brackets and some slight modifications are mine.) Dap’s group includes Grady (Bill Nunn), Booker T. (Eric Payne), Jordan (Branford Marsalis), Edge (Kadeem Hardison), and the relatively inarticulate Monroe (James Bond III), all dressed and groomed with a “natural” look; the locals include an unnamed waitress (Tracey Lewis) as well as Leeds (Samuel L. Jackson) and his crew of Moses (Edward G. Bridges), Spoon (Albert Cooper), and Eric (Dennis Abrams), some of whom wear Jerri curls and garish plastic caps to protect their hairdos. A good example of code-switching occurs when the students ask the waitress for three two-piece meals, all of them “waht w’ frahs,” initiating this exchange:
Since standard English and AAV are on a single linguistic and semantic continuum, with a good deal of overlap, the waitress’s adherence to standard English in this informal, conventionalized exchange with black people is a significant choice, asserting her refusal to identify with the students; in response, Grady uses AAV, thereby “communicating to her both that he recognizes the implicit message in her marked choice of code, and that he repudiates it” (Thomas 918, 922).
Another good example takes place after Dap and company have left the restaurant under pressure from the locals, who follow them into the parking lot:
Having prevailed in the confrontation, for the moment at least, the students walk backward to their car and drive away. Analyzing this moment, Thomas observes that Leeds’s highly charged line (“Y’all niggahs …”) places the college students “under Leeds’s own ethnic self-description,” changing the argument from “Who is truly black?” to “What does it mean to be black?” Dap frames his response (“You’re not niggahs”) in the first phonetically and syntactically standard English he has used in speaking with the locals, reserving AAV only for the final word, which he takes directly from Leed’s taunt. Dap thus asserts his difference from the locals, rejects the claim of racial destiny, declares his refusal of the derogatory term, and voices that refusal in a second-person statement that extends it to Leeds and his friends, ascribing more dignity to them than they are ascribing to themselves (Thomas 919, 920, 923).
Lee wrote the School Daze screenplay in standard English for the most part, so contributions from the ensemble cast deserve credit along with Lee’s scripting and directing skills for the nuances of vernacular speech that enrich the chicken-joint scene and other sequences. Linguistically speaking, Thomas finds the film’s uses of AAV and code-switching between dialects to have a wholly authentic ring (925), and she notes that the Kentucky Fried Chicken episode has drawn praise even from otherwise severe critics of the movie, such as essayist and editor Fred Beauford, whose largely negative review grudgingly admitted that the restaurant scene reveals “the Spike Lee everyone was raving about last year” (Beauford, cited in Thomas 914).
Stepping High
The highly significant speech patterns in the Kentucky Fried Chicken scene are underscored and supplemented by knowingly orchestrated details of costume, gesture, and body language. The episode can therefore be taken as a small-scale exercise in a kind of African-American discourse that was riding particularly high in the late 1980s: stepping, a performance ritual – located almost entirely in black colleges and universities, especially among fraternity and sorority members – that is actually a set of interlinked actions known as cracking, freaking, and saluting. Three years after School Daze gave stepping the widest, most diversified exposure it had yet received, performance scholar Elizabeth C. Fine estimated that some five thousand Greek-letter chapters with half a million members participated in the practice, a complicated affair (evidently dating back to the 1940s) that involves dancing, singing, chanting, and speaking, with words and music derived from African-American folk traditions as well as advertising jingles, TV theme songs, and current radio and jukebox hits. Sometimes called “blocking,” after the block (yard) where students tend to gather and hang out, stepping varies greatly from one region, locale, and venue to another, serving in all its forms as a rite of group identity that manifests the “spirit, style, icons, and unity” of its participants. The main components of stepping are cracking or cutting, whereby groups aim verbal or nonverbal taunts at one another; freaking, which happens when a freaker or “show dog” breaks out of the group activity in a bid for special attention and approval; and saluting, a display of good feeling communicated by one group to another through imitations of its characteristic moves or symbols (E.C. Fine 39, 40, 47–8).
Using a high-spirited step show to encapsulate and dramatize the cultural gap that divides Jigaboos from Wannabes on the Mission campus, Lee constructs a bravura production number: Da Fellas are on the stage; the Gamma Rays start cracking, as do the Gamma Rays in the audience; Da Fellas raise the stakes with a step routine insulting the Gamma Rays, piling them with homophobic and class-based insults; and finally Da Fellas make an outright threat – “Get back, or we’ll kick your Gamma ass” – and leave the stage, precipitating a full-out brawl. Pointing to connections between School Daze on the screen and school days in real colleges, Fine says the film’s clashes between dark-skinned and light-skinned women are “similar to the perceived conflict between Alpha Kappa Alpha and Delta Sigma Theta at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, which some students believe involves skin color.” Although women of all shades are found in both sororities, Fine reports that some students counterfactually think “that one has to have skin the color of a brown paper bag to be a member of AKA, while the women of DST are darker” (57).
Lighter-skinned Wannabes square off against darker-skinned Jigaboos in one of the uproarious musical numbers in School Daze.
Pigment Nation
This gets to the heart of the movie. The action of School Daze is sometimes frenetic and often sophomoric, but as Dyson recognizes when he calls the film a morality play, its main concern is entirely serious: the philosophical divide between black Americans who want to embody, refine, and celebrate their black African identities and roots, and those who want to integrate, assimilate, and ultimately dissolve into mainstream American society, which is largely dominated and defined by whites. And the film’s chief metaphor for this divide – colorism – is itself a real and troubling phenomenon. School Daze spotlights it as a chronic symptom of the psychological and spiritual oppression that is largely responsible, in Lee’s view, for the African-American insecurity of which Dyson speaks.
After surveying numerous studies of skin-color stratification, sociologist Margaret L. Hunter reported in 2002 that hierarchies of color, determined by lightness or darkness of skin tone, are an ”enduring part of the US racial landscape,” supported by “popular understandings within the Black community about beauty and status.” Observing that the effects of skin color on income and educational level are determined in part by the prejudices of white employers and educators, Hunter finds a more disturbing phenomenon to be the “clear advantage in the marriage market” enjoyed by light-skinned black women, who are “more likely to marry high-status men than [are] darker skinned women.” Since this marriage-market inequality has little to do with prejudices among white people, Hunter takes it as evidence for “the pervasiveness of racist ideologies that value whiteness and emulations of it” within African-American culture itself (176, 189). It follows that Lee’s attack on pigmentocracy in School Daze is far from unjustified or gratuitous, however grating its color-fixated characters and jigaboo–wannabe vocabulary may sometimes seem.
Sense of Outrage
Critics found much to criticize in School Daze. The reviewer for Variety (1987) opined that the film’s mixture of forms and styles “never comes together in a coherent whole,’ that Lee’s directing “fails to strike the right note between realism and fantasy,” and that “the heavy subject matter just falls with a thud.” Washington Post critic Rita Kempley (1988) wrote that the “pompous patchwork plot . . . is an arrogant, humorless, sexist mess,” and her co-critic Desson Howe (1988) said the film’s episodes “are overdrawn when they’re not under-explained,” building to either “predictable inanity or nothing at all.” Janet Maslin’s more tempered New York Times review (1988) called School Daze the work of a “brave, original and prodigious talent,” but complained that Lee doesn’t let his daring off the leash, creating a hodgepodge of ingredients “bound together only loosely by [his] prevailing sense of outrage.”
The most influential critic to speak in favor of School Daze was Roger Ebert (1988), who deemed it “the first movie in a long time where the black characters seem to be relating to one another, instead of to a hypothetical white audience.” Although he acknowledged “big structural problems” and many “loose ends” in the film, Ebert noted the surprise of finding a “daffy story” treated in a manner that is “revolutionary” in its avoidance of the problems that damage most movies about black people, which seem “acutely aware of white audiences, white value systems and the white Hollywood establishment.” Ebert goes on to discuss with refreshing insight the scene that most offended other commentators:
In its own way, School Daze confronts a lot of issues that aren’t talked about in the movies these days: not only issues of skin color and hair, but also the emergence of a black class, the purpose of all-black universities in an integrated society, and the sometimes sexist treatment of black women by black men. In one of the movie’s most uncompromising sequences, a black fraternity pledge master expresses concern that Half-Pint is still a virgin (none of the brothers in this house should be virgins), and he supplies his own girlfriend (Tisha Campbell) to initiate the freshman. She actually goes through with it, tearfully, and although the scene was so painful it was difficult to watch, I later reflected that Lee played it for the pain, not for the kind of smutty comedy we might expect in a movie about undergraduates.
In its own way, I will add, School Daze accomplishes the task that Mission College finds so difficult. Mischievously and mercilessly, it uplifts the race – not just the very-black race and the not-so-black race and the white race and the other color-based “races” vying for power, freedom, and dignity in today’s America, but rather the human race, which is the one that matters.
